Tenacious lawyer taking on archdiocese likes big challenges

ANDREW WOLFSON
The Courier-Journal

Infected with HIV and unable to pay her lawyers, the plaintiff seemed doomed to represent herself in a lawsuit claiming that Jewish Hospital had improperly disclosed her condition.

But on Jan. 30, 1997 - the day the trial was to start - attorney William McMurry read in the newspaper about Traci Walls' plight and showed the story to his 10-year-old son. "Isn't this what you do?" McMurry said the boy asked. "Why don't you go do it?"

So with no preparation and a client he'd never met, McMurry tried the case for free and won a $125,000 verdict. "God sent him," Walls exulted after the trial. The verdict ultimately was reversed, and Walls died shortly after her case did. But the impromptu trial performance was pure McMurry, say lawyers and judges, relatives and former clients:

Fighting for the underdog against a powerful institution. Self-assured, even cocky. Steaming with righteous indignation. Living on the edge, whether it's sky diving - he's made more than 3,000 jumps - or jousting with witnesses in the courtroom.

"He is absolutely bulldog tenacious," said his brother, John McMurry, an obstetrician/gynecologist who would not want Bill McMurry suing him. "He can be a scary guy."

Now Bill McMurry, 46, is taking on another powerful institution - the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Louisville - in what could be his biggest case.

He is the attorney in all but two of the 75 recently filed suits in which former Catholic-school students and parishioners say the archdiocese negligently hired and retained priests who, the plaintiffs claim, molested them over four decades.

"We will prove that Archbishop (Thomas C.) Kelly knew . . . and acquiesced in allowing predator priests to remain around children," McMurry charged one day last week as he juggled a prospective client in his conference room with others on the phone and a TV crew waiting in his office.

"To say the church has not been hiding things - that we never knew about these cases - is an abomination," McMurry added.

McMurry's staunchest supporters, as well as a few critics, say that he sees no shades of gray and views everyone on the other side - defendants, defense lawyers, defense witnesses - as part of the evil empire.

McMurry pleads guilty as charged.

"Most of the defendants I go up against are . . . evil," he said. "Insurance companies that have acted in bad faith, doctors or lawyers who haven't followed accepted standards of care.

"I don't hold my tongue," he said. "The conduct of the archdiocese in decades past is evil."

McMurry - previously best known for forcing the disbarment of local attorney Norman "Nick" Belker, who was accused of molesting clients - says the battle with the archdiocese is deeply personal.

For one thing, he said, a close relative was sexually abused for years by a neighbor and has never recovered from it. "This has been a strong influence on my desire to see these victims" - the people suing the archdiocese - "properly recognized, appreciated and compensated."